Best & Worst New Musical Instruments of the 2000s

Copied below is my response to the contributors' poll H+ Magazine published on New Year's Eve Eve, 2010: "What were the best and worst _______s of the 00s?" Everyone chose a different topic, although most people preferred to ignore the "_____" and suggest more sweeping milestones for the decade. A few months later and I'm sticking to my guns about this one...

Worst New Musical Instrument: Guitar Hero

Essentially an electronic sample-triggering interface with near-zero control over which samples — more of a percussion toy than the guitar to whose lovers it was marketed — Guitar Hero exemplifies to me a massive step backward, the mascot of an obsolete paradigm. User input is a binary endeavor — you either march on beat to the manufacturer’s selection of Top 40 content, or suffer the annoying clicks that announce your failure. Way to perpetuate the producer/consumer divide, Guitar Hero! Way to reinforce the Pavlovian nightmare of school bells and rote learning that already undermines the last-resort creative capital of the western world.... This kind of musical training will cripple our next generation of musicians when the time comes to prove our worth next to improvising robots. And that’ll be, like, now.

Best New Musical Instrument: The Reactable

If Guitar Hero operates on the centralized, consumption-centered media-model of television, The Reactable is the musical avatar of Web 2.0. Not only is it a content-free revolution in musical control interfaces with a negligible learning curve (kids can pick it up almost immediately) that screams for collaborative applications (it can be played by as many people as can squeeze themselves around the table), but it was actually designed vision-first with these qualities in mind by an entire academic music technology department in Barcelona. And the tech they developed to make their dream a reality is applicable to a ludicrous range of “interactive tangible multi-touch applications” limited solely by our collective imagination. Watching this device in the able hands on stage with Björk last year made me feel like I’d been abducted by the future — and if the future bears any resemblance, it will be an awesome party, indeed.

(Read the whole contributor's poll at H+ Magazine.)

Finding The Music In Noise

As should now be apparent from my essays on the Light Harp and on Tantric Listening, if I am a seeker of anything, it is of music in what is considered nonmusical. Consequently, I am a huge fan of music that draws its inspiration from environmental sounds. Clyde Stubblefield, "the world's most sampled drummer" for his work with James Brown (and thus himself something of an environmental phenomenon), had some great stuff to say about this in his essay on time for the September 2007 issue Modern Drummer Magazine:

"I learned to keep time when I was a kid by focusing on my walking. I really listened to all the sounds around me and always heard rhythm in them. Whatever the leg and foot patterns of my walking may be, that's the time I focus on. Those are my timekeepers.

I lived in Chattanooga, Tennesee as a child, and there was a big factory where they made cardboard boxes. The factory had a big smoke stack. Every morning it would start puffing smoke out, and you could hear it all over the city. So From early in the morning until about 4:00 p.m., you heard this smock stack going PUFF-puff-PUFF-puff-PUFF-puff all around you. I also remember the sound of the old washing machine at home going slish-slosh-slish-slosh all the time. And hearing that tick-tock of our big clock - it all stuck in my head. I would fall asleep to the sound of that clock. I feel that all of these things helped develop my time as a drummer."

Yes indeed, internalizing our environment is the evolutionary process itself (more on that here). So we are taking a more active role in evolution when we groove to the sounds around us, whatever they may be. Peter Gabriel, in his infinite wisdom, has of course already written a song about this:

Peter Gabriel - My Head Sounds Like That

Listening with headphones, you can hear the scratchy percussion track come in when he's singing about the burnt brown toast, and the dull repeating thud when he talks about his neighbor hammering something...it's a gorgeous song.

In the same vein, Björk made a whole movie, Dancer in the Dark, about the musical fantasies that take over a woman's imagination as she goes blind. Increasingly forced to rely on her hearing to escape her suffering, she fancies herself the star in a series of outlandish interludes:

Electronic sampling has helped us make sense of our busy industrial world for decades. When I got my computer, I was most excited about the little built-in microphone - suddenly I had a mobile recording studio! The first thing I did was go record the oh-so-melodic sound of rotors and computation that the ATM makes before spitting out cash (I'd been waiting to do it for weeks). That sample, and a synth flute I made from blowing a Tanqueray bottle, were prominently featured in my first electronic composition:

In my next piece, I carried it a bit further into Björk territory and made almost the entire song from random noises - including a soda fountain, wind chimes, a shaken box full of old toys, and the rustling pages of a book (Osho's Tantric Transformations)

Michael Garfield - ...And The World Rushes In

In the works are another song that grooves to the University of Kansas Herpetology Department's printer; one that squeezes anthemic glory out of a rusty dishwasher door; and a kind of tribal thing that features me drumming on the computer itself (oooh, how recursive!). Tonight, I'm playing a show with a electronic drum kits composed of little chimey things I found lying around at my old job in the candle shop. I'm sure that sooner or later the novelty of saying, "That gorgeous synthesizer tone is me dragging a chair across the floor" will wear off, but in the meantime it's a game I'm playing with the universe to find cool new textures and rhythms where I wouldn't normally pay attention.

The more I listen, the more intimate I become with the various properties of my surroundings - learning to anticipate how this table might sound if I struck it with that magazine, wondering whether my laptop mic is sensitive enough to pick up the sound of me rubbing two leaves together (and if so, what part of the drum kit would that be?).

It's a great game. But it tickles me when artists are not only paying attention to this stuff, but lending their creative ear to music that ends up doing something important. Tim and Chris Bran, aka the Vapour Brothers, showed me up with this gorgeous little cut-up ditty they created for SOS Live Earth ("Concerts For A Climate In Crisis"):

...Just in case you were wondering how to make cool music, commune with the kosmos, and help save the planet all at the same time. But don't think you need expensive recording equipment to start crafting your own found sound masterworks. The Freesound Project is a massive collaborate effort that collects and archives all kinds of cool environmental samples under a Creative Commons license for anyone to use. Thanks, guys!

And there you have it. Maybe now that jackhammer outside your window will put a little swing in your step. Why not? The world sings for us.

(Written for iggli.com.)

Visionary Instruments: The Light Harp

"We are the music makers, the dreamers of dreams."
- Arthur O'Shaughnessy

I recently discovered another new instrument designed for use by more than one person: Jen Lewin's ultra-cool Light Harp. Starting with a Theremin-type concept (waving your hands through space to make music) and expanding it into several new dimensions, the Light Harp is a massive installation piece that uses laser beams to translate its users' motions into sound.

You literally play this thing by catching light in your hand. Each beam measures both the height and speed at which it is broken and assigns them independent variables - volume, pitch, etc. Lewin has been making them for twelve years, but she's gotten a lot of exposure from more recent exhibitions at Burning Man 2005 and Wired's NextFest 2007.

Less a formal instrument and more an interactive sculpture, Lewin's vision is to have her Light Harps played with haphazardly with up to sixty people, while still making beautiful noise. Here is a demonstrative video of children playing the Light Harp (many more on her website):

...and here is a totally different use of the harp, featuring a dancer with gauzy wings:

So there you have it. The more we as a culture enter into a relationship with our environment and understand that all sound is music from the right perspective (paraphrasing Ken Wilber, "Art is anything with a frame around it"), the more we are going to create works of art that reveal this understanding.

The Light Harp is one such piece - a real work of grace that reminds us of our role as creators in the world and invites us to participate in that creation. An appropriate artifact for Burning Man, a festival at which the principle of "radical participation" - being through doing - is fiercely upheld as an antidote to our culture of passive consumption.

Long, long ao, we lost our sense that everyone is a musician, that everyone is an active part of the celebration. We marvel at African cultures in which everyone knows they can sing and dance, and does so from birth. We handed over the responsibility for our art to the chosen few, and then we handed over our choice. Now we live in an age in which most people believe that art (and especially music) is something that belongs to someone else, some nubile god-king or queen of the recording leviathan.

But at the same time, we are discovering the sacred voice of the world, the creative will of not just everyone, but everything. An increasing amount of popular music features "found sounds" and atmospheric rhythms gathered from natural sources. Björk's soundtrack to the film Dancer in the Dark is punctuated with the beats of factory machines, footsteps, and railcars.

We are waking up to a world that presents itself to us as a gift, and we in return are beginning to sculpt a culture that engages us as active co-conspirators in the divine dance of it all. Beauty is back in rank with Truth and Goodness. We are the music makers, again, finally. The Light Harp is proof.

(Written for iggli.com.)

Visionary Instruments: The Reactable

This is the first entry in a series I'll be doing on instruments that are revolutionizing the way we make - and understand - music. I was inspired to do this column by my introduction to one of the most inspiring inventions of any kind that I have ever seen, a wonderful new music performance device (it bends the definition of "instrument") called the reactable.

(I saw it at a Björk concert in April - leave it to her to debut musical technology that makes people feel like they've been cryogenically frozen for a hundred years!)

Devised by the Interactive Sonic Systems Team at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, the reactable is a totally novel musical control interface driven not by technology, but by a vision of a new way to make noise. The reactable homepage declares the intent behind it all - to make an instrument that is:

- collaborative: several performers (locally or remotely)
- intuitive: zero manual, zero instructions
- sonically challenging and interesting
- learnable and masterable (even for children)
- suitable for novices (installations) and advanced electronic musicians (concerts)

No small task, and yet these people have pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Here are some demonstrations:

Now that you have an inkling as to how this works, here's an example of the reactable in a live environment, on the Björk tour for which none of us were even remotely prepared (don't skip ahead, but the reactable is nicely featured in a segment starting at 4:36):

So yeah. Go visit the team's reactable media page for a score of additional videos that boggle the mind (as well as hi-res versions of those above, so you can feel even more futuristic - and even an amusing clip of Bob Moog playing an early protoype).

What tickles me the most is that, not only did the Interactive Sonic Systems team start with an idea and then bring the technology up to the level of that idea (which, as far as I'm concerned, is how it should be done: leading with intention), but that they left enough clues that you can build your own! All of their publications from the inception of the idea can be found here. The open-source code they wrote to control the visual recognition elements can be found here. A few pieces are still proprietary, but there's enough information scattered around in user groups that some buddies of mine, members of the Boulder, CO visionary art collective Motion For Alliance, built their own prototype. They brought it out for its debut last night at the Trilogy Wine Bar in Boulder - and, of course, it blew everybody away. Here's a video of their "bootleg" reactable:

They had four people working this thing last night, simultaneously - a vivid demonstration of the new realm of collaborative improvisation this thing opens up for us. (I'll try and post a video from the concert here soon.) Pretty soon, Fisher Price will be making one, they'll be selling them at Wal-Mart, and cafés will be spilling over with acoustic guitar and reactable duos...at which point, musicianship will be a whole new game. Spain, I tip my hat to you.